drawing

Today Google has opened the gates for I/O 2019 registration. The event itself might still be months away from May 7th to 9th, but if you actually want to attend, you'll need to snag yourself one of those $1,150 tickets. To do that, you'll have to register for a place in the random drawing. You've got until February 27th at 5PM PST (8PM ET) to enter, and tickets will be going out the following day.

Google's video chat app Duo has always been a pretty lightweight app, seemingly focused primarily on keeping the interface simple and prioritizing video and audio quality over flooding it with features. We've seen a few features slowly emerge over the last couple of years, and just about as many have been implemented and subsequently removed before launching. While we wait to see the eventual launch of a favorites list for contacts, there's another new feature in development that may liven up your video chats: Drawing mode. There's also another reminder that group calling is on the way.

Earlier today, our buds over at Chrome Unboxed spotted a new progressive web app by Google called Chrome Canvas. It's a very simple sketching/doodling app that works best on devices like Chromebooks with stylus-based input, but it will also run on your desktop or phone. The new app is showing up as an installed app on some Chromebooks running Dev and Canary channels, but you can pull it down manually on other devices right now.

If you have an especially normal memory, you might be able to dig back far enough in your mind's history to last month, when news of a doodling, AI-powered camera was making the rounds. It was called Draw This, and the camera worked by visually recognizing objects in a scene, feeding those object names back into Google's "Quick, Draw!" dataset, and then placing them together in a similar configuration. The resulting photos were printed onto thermal paper, giving you an instant Polaroid-style doodle. Well, turns out all of us can enjoy those doodles for ourselves, as enterprising developer Eric Lu has turned it into a website called Cartoonify.

Autodesk SketchBook is now completely free. Up until this month, certain features—the majority of the app's brush presets, for example—were only available as part of a subscription plan that cost $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year. The full feature set does still require an Autodesk account, but that's also free.

Google's AI Experiments are fun showcases for feats of artificial intelligence the company's research has enabled. Scrying Pen is a new one that uses algorithms trained by data from 2016's Quick, Draw! experiment to show a path to draw one of a set of objects, like a cat or a hand.

A couple of weeks ago, Wacom announced the Bamboo Tip, a fine-tip stylus that had us interested. We've seen several of these "active capacitive" pens before, but they still occupy a rather forgotten category - one that's neither fully active neither as cheap as regular capacitive pens. So to get a better idea of how these pens work and whether or not they're worth the rather hefty price tag, I decided to take the Bamboo Tip for a test drive. I think it works well, but the $49.95 asking price is tough to justify.

Last week was pretty busy with some big app updates and even bigger product announcements. One update that slipped through the cracks was Allo v6. There aren't any obvious new features, but there's plenty for a teardown. Some of the upcoming features will include a chat bot to enable voting among members of a group chat, Android Auto support, animated emoji, and some new drawing tools.

There's a new version of Google Keep rolling out to Android devices, but it's not going to look very different unless you are looking in exactly the right spot. The screen for drawing notes is now equipped with the "Grab image text" function. Shifting gears slightly, a teardown also reveals some new drawing functions are going to be added to the same screen in a future update. As usual, there's a link at the bottom where you can download the latest version.